Posts made in August, 2014

If you’re like me, you’ve had to deal with a few batteries in your career. It’s usually one of the weak links in mission-critical environments; and consequently, we find ourselves obsessing over battery condition, life expectancy, and failure rates quite often. We can literally spend millions of dollars each year due to failed cells or end-of-life replacements. Wouldn’t it be nice not to have to deal with that – or even to worry about it? I have recently (with some excitement, I might add) been investigating vanadium redox flow batteries. These systems use fluids — or more precisely, electrolytes — to store energy. I’m not going to get technical in this post; but if you want to know more today, here’s a Wikipedia link. How the battery works Basically, there are two tanks of electrolyte with a membrane in a frame between the two. The two electrolytes set up a potential across the membrane that allows for the flow of electrons....